5 websites to learn to code- for free!

Nov

Nowadays we all know that technology helps us to be more productive in almost all aspects of our lives. You can create automated reports for your boss in minutes instead of wasting the whole weekend gathering together all the information you need- which involves calling back and forth your team trying to understand where the numbers come from. You can also use as many apps as you wish on your phone to help you organize your best friend’s wedding *the wedding of the year!*. Or at college you can simply take a shot of the whiteboard to have all the info you’ll need for the exam, instead of wasting all your energy writing it down in paper- like if you were in the 20th century…

We love technology and some of us can’t even fathom spending a single day without it. But when it comes to the core of the matter- coding, which is the wizard that creates all the magic that we see on our screens- most people get uneasy. We prefer our IT-team- or our teenagers- to handle it. After watching a TED talk from Mitch Resnick, a computer scientist that directs the Lifelong Kindergarten group at MIT Media Lab and helps kids of all ages experiment with design and coding, I got really inspired to learn more about coding.

He said: “Coding isn’t just for computer whizzes- it’s for everyone… If you learn to code, then you code to learn. These ideas are useful to everybody.”, and I definitely believe it. A lot of problems that I’ve had can be easily solved by customizing or developing a program, but I don’t know how to code. So, since talk is cheap, I googled it and found some awesome websites to learn how to code for free! I hope you find them useful and join me in this journey of zeros, ones, strings and variables.

At Codecademy, you can learn how to write simple commands in JavaScript, HTML and CSS, Python and Ruby. Great to warm up engines by getting to know four of the most commonly used programing languages.

Coursera is another great site that offers college courses for free. The course The Data Scientist’s Toolbox from Johns Hopkins University will give you an overview of the data and tools that data analysts scientists work with, including R programming.

Code School offers online courses in a wide range of programming languages, design and web tools.

Treehouse provides online video courses and exercises to help you learn technology skills.

If you are more of a practical person, who wants to implement something innovative in your business ASAP, you might want to take a look at Dash. Here you will learn how to make an awesome website by using HTML, CSS and Javascript through fun projects on a simple interface.